Measuring College Learning

What are college students learning? Informed by SoTL, instructors can use a variety of assessment techniques to answer this question. But as questions about learning move into governance and policy circles, challenges of scale, expense, and public intelligibility make academic leaders chiefly open to the idea of standardized assessment. While faculty tend to view standardized assessment tools with distaste, college professors will not turn back the tide of demands for accountability armed only with brooms. A better response to the coming of standardized assessment would view the design of such tools as an intellectual problem to be tackled with the spirit of inquiry that animates SoTL research. One way to bring SoTL into the quality conversation is by engaging faculty in consensus-driven discussions about learning outcomes and assessment. I will report on my experiences with the Measuring College Learning Project (MCL), an initiative of the Social Science Research Council that has been bringing panels of faculty together from six fields of study (biology, business, communication, economics, history, and sociology) to identify the essential 21st Century competencies, concepts, and practices that students in their fields should develop in college

Consuming Credit

This article provides an editorial introduction to the special issue of Consumption Markets & Culture devoted to the consolidated mass markets and cultures of contemporary consumer credit. It identifies a strange irony that arises from the extant social scientific literatures on consumption and retail finance: for all the analysis that they offer of consumerism and credit, the consumption of consumer credit itself is rarely considered. An overview is provided of how the articles in the special issue intersect with the sparse literature dedicated to consuming credit and personal financial consumption, and collectively signal new directions for study. It is suggested that, when read together, the articles mark out a trajectory for further research into consuming credit which has three principal and related arcs of interest: the marketing and sale of consumer credit; the repositioning of debt as a consumption problem; and the critical capacities of a cultural economy perspective